Feast of Sparks

by Sierra Simone

  Feast of Sparks

  Sierra Simone

  Copyright © 2019 by Sierra Simone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Hang Le

  Cover Image: Regina Wamba

  Editing: Nancy Smay of Evident Ink, Erica Russikoff of Erica Edits

  Proofing: Michele Ficht

  Contents

  Content Warning

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  II. Equinox

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part III

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Thornchapel has more secrets . . .

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sierra Simone

  Content Warning

  Chapter Seventeen contains a scene of graphic bullying. This chapter can be skipped over and its contents inferred from the following chapters.

  Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;

  But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

  * * *

  O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,

  I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.

  —“Hymn to Proserpine”, Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Eight Years Ago

  St. Sebastian knew better than to look.

  St. Sebastian always knew better.

  He looked anyway.

  As the lector read aloud from the Book of Romans and the usual rustle of coughs and shifting seats filled the nave, St. Sebastian Perth Martinez turned his head and he looked.

  “I do not understand my own actions,” the lector said, and the microphone on the pulpit sent the words echoing everywhere. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

  Across the aisle, in the very front row, Auden Guest listened along with the reading. He didn’t listen the way his parents did—with stiff-straight backs and bland expressions—no, Auden had his head bowed over a Bible and followed along with a pencil.

  He had glasses on, St. Sebastian noticed with a twist in his stomach. No one at school wore glasses if they could help it, and here was Auden in tortoiseshell frames like a professor, bent over a fucking Bible, no less. His hair had grown out just enough that it waved over his eyes, and every few moments he had to shake it free so he could keep reading.

  It pissed St. Sebastian off.

  Everything about Auden pissed St. Sebastian off, actually. The glasses, the Bible, the hair. The expensive trousers and the shirt that pulled across his shoulders and his fucking tie. The awful way his Adam’s apple knotted above his collar whenever he glanced up at the lector. The stupid swoop of his upper lip, which he would not stop tracing with the eraser of his pencil, tracing it the way St. Sebastian sometimes traced his own mouth at night, alone, imagining it was someone else. Anyone else.

  “For I know nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh,” the lector continued, and St. Sebastian’s mother glanced over at him. St. Sebastian immediately threw his gaze forward, as if he’d been paying attention all along. When Jennifer Martinez looked, she looked, and the look was the only warning you got. If you ignored the look and kept goofing off, there was hell to pay. She was already on edge because he’d worn eyeliner and his Thirty Seconds to Mars T-shirt to church, and St. Sebastian knew she wasn’t going to be tested a single bit more, not today.

  St. Sebastian didn’t always mind this; his mother’s scolds and swats came from the same place her smiles and hugs came from, and as much as he’d sulk and scowl and storm up to his room after getting in trouble, it was an indisputable fact that his mother loved him. She loved him when he fucked up at school, she loved him when he fucked up at home. She loved him when he told her he hated her, when he told her he wished he’d never been born, when he told her he was going to run away because he hated it so fucking much in Thorncombe he could scream.

  So she loved him even when there was hell to pay. The hell was part of her love, and such an embedded curl in St. Sebastian’s DNA that he didn’t know what to do without it. When there were teachers who let him get away with mischief and other adults who let him get away with mayhem, he felt strangely bereft. He felt unmoored.

  Because love meant hell sometimes. This made sense to St. Sebastian, even if he didn’t always like it.

  But he didn’t want to be in trouble now. The Guests only came to Dartmoor a few times a year, which meant St. Sebastian only got to see Auden a few times a year, and seeing Auden was like touching one’s tongue to a battery—pleasantly unpleasant. A shock one couldn’t help but repeat over and over again, as if expecting each time to be different.

  It was never different.

  The lector finished, and then it was time to stand for the Gospel reading. St. Sebastian noticed that Auden’s mother seemed pale and shaky the entire time—a hand trembled so badly that Auden took it in his own, and she gave her son a watery, grateful look in return. A look that vanished the moment she saw her husband looking at her.

  It was St. Sebastian’s experience that most happy or grateful looks disappeared in the presence of Ralph Guest. He sometimes imagined what it would be like to go up and push him, go up and hit him, for no other reason than that St. Sebastian used to be terrified of him as a boy and therefore resented him.

  I’m almost as tall as him now, he thought fiercely. I could do it.

  He’d have to get in line behind Auden though, from the looks of things. Auden glanced over to his father and gave him a dirty enough stare that St. Sebastian could feel it even from across the aisle. And then Auden gave a quick look around, as if to make sure no one witnessed the painful family display the Guests had just put on for the congregation. Those hazel eyes flicked around the nave and then landed on him.

  St. Sebastian could tell the moment Auden recognized him; he could see the widening of those hypnotic eyes and the part of his expressive mouth. He looked as if he wanted to say something, and St. Sebastian felt his hand twitch, like he was going to wave, and then self-loathing spiked through him and he scowled and looked away.

  He refused to look at Auden again for the rest of the service.

  He knew better after all.

  Chapter 2

  St. Sebastian

  Present day

  * * *

  Death is a part of life.

  A miserable rain has started up since I carried a sobbing Poe back to the house and called the police. As I stand at the edge of the trees and watch the officers swarm the muddy ruins, I can hardly believe that this is the same thorn chapel we fucked and bled in last night. Last night, by the light of candles and fire, it had been a place of magic and mystery and depthless time, like a well
in the heart of the woods, but not a well of water. A well of timeless . . . something.

  But today, it’s small and tired and grim. The cops swish around in bright yellow coats taking pictures and unwinding rolls of plastic tape; every now and again, one will come up to ask Auden a question, and since he’s standing next to me, I can hear his cold answers. Cold like the day, cold like the wet, brown grass, and the shivering, naked trees.

  If a hiker were hiking through, he’d take one look at the muddy scar where the altar used to be, the total absence of anything beautiful, and he’d keep walking.

  I’m at home, though, in the grim and quiet places of the world, and there’s something about the bleakness of the thorn chapel that comforts me right now. Like it knows it yielded death up to us and refuses to desecrate the moment with garish displays of sunshine or spring.

  A sober clutch of reality after the heady magic of the night before. A winter scene for winter bones.

  Death is a part of life.

  “You’re angry with me,” I say finally, turning to face the man I’ve been in love with for eight years. He’s in a chunky, shawl-necked sweater, dark green trousers, and a gray wool coat—a look only he could pull off—and even with mud caked around his Hunter boots and his hair going wavy in the rain, he looks amazing.

  Damn him.

  “You’re angry with me,” I repeat.

  “I’m not,” he says.

  “You are.”

  He makes an exasperated sound, turning to me in a flapping of wool and squelch of mud. “Has it occurred to you that maybe I’m upset because they’ve just found a body on my family’s property? Because the body belongs to Proserpina’s mother? Because they won’t let me—or you—be with her while they interview her, and so she’s alone right now, and I can’t—I can’t—”

  He shoves a hand into his hair—then, finding it wet from the rain, he makes a noise of disgust and jams both his hands into his coat pockets.

  “I’m upset about all of that too,” I say quietly. “But you were already angry this morning when I came to find you.” And he had been. After seeing Proserpina settled on the window seat we all thought of as Rebecca’s, and having Rebecca and Delphine tend to her, I went to Auden’s office to tell him what had happened. He’d been working as he often did on weekends, bent over his drawing tablet while his double monitors flickered with screensavers of floor plans and elevations. He’d looked up at me when I entered, and even before I said a word, I saw hurt and fury brimming in his eyes like lakes of fire.

  And I could guess why, even though I didn’t have time then to confront him about it.

  Auden turns back to face the police officers, but nothing can hide the tensing of his jaw and the sudden rigidity in his stance. He knows I’m right, he knows I know that he is angry with me, and I think maybe he can’t decide if he wants to chide me or hide the skin right off my arse right now.

  “You know about Proserpina and me,” I say.

  He utters a low oath and turns all the way away from me, taking a few steps in the opposite direction, before turning back. “We’re not talking about this now.”

  “Then when do you want to talk about it?” I ask. “Because you and I both know that when we go back to the house, Poe is going to be our first priority, and I’m not going to let you make her feel even worse while she’s going through this—”

  “I should give you all those belt marks I promised you once upon a time,” he says tightly, “just for suggesting that. I would never make her feel bad because she shared a bed with someone, and especially not on this morning. Especially not after last night.”

  My greedy mind grabs at the word belt, at the word marks, and takes its time assimilating the rest. “You once said you’d die on the spot if Proserpina chose me.”

  He flinches.

  “Well. Did you?”

  I expect more anger. I expect him to retreat into that untouchable prince act, to deliver some scathing rejoinder that will have me clench-jawed all day. But instead he meets my gaze and says, “Yes, St. Sebastian. I did.”

  He walks away to join the sergeant on the scene, leaving me alone to the watchful company of the trees and my own rainy thoughts.

  Chapter 3

  Eight Years Ago

  They always went to the abbey in Buckfast for Mass because Jennifer liked the beauty and splendor of it, and also because it meant they could do their shopping right after. Today, she let St. Sebastian roam around the grounds of the abbey while she went to the supermarket, promising to be back in an hour to pick him up. If her voice was stranger than usual, he didn’t pay it much mind. She always seemed distant and sad when the Guests were in town. Probably because their very presence was calculated to remind one of the money one would never have.

  After checking to make sure his eyeliner was still only artfully smudged and not crying-girl-at-the-club-smudged, St. Sebastian scuffed his way through the throngs of summer tourists crowding the abbey’s grounds, and made his way to the cemetery, which was shady and abandoned by virtue of the huge trees and shrubs hiding it from view.

  He pulled out his phone—a Christmas present from his grandparents and the nicest thing he owned—and turned on some music. He tried lying in a grave-free patch of grass, but had to retreat from the July sunlight after only a few minutes. Finally, he settled against a tree-shaded gravestone, which was a very romantic and cool thing to do, in his opinion. He’d made it through three songs and was possibly on the way to a nap when he felt a tap on the bottom of his foot. Like someone had gently kicked his shoe.

  He opened his eyes to see Auden Guest standing over him.

  “Nice music,” Auden said softly.

  St. Sebastian turned it off.

  Heat gathered in his face and in his belly—an erratic, unfamiliar heat. He decided it was because he was embarrassed Auden heard his music, heard the songs that meant so much to St. Sebastian, the angry, lonely lyrics and the charging refrains. That was private, as far as St. Sebastian was concerned. That was as good as looking in someone’s diary.

  And maybe nobody could tell merely from listening to it that St. Sebastian was unhealthily preoccupied with a green-eyed American girl and a hazel-eyed prince he’d once kissed when he was twelve, but they’d certainly be able to guess if they saw the title of the playlist. A playlist he’d painstakingly transferred from his old iPod to his phone because it was something he needed with him always—at home or at school or in the odd hours after church and before his mother was finished with her shopping. It was a record of every ache, every angry longing he’d had for Proserpina Markham and Auden Guest that day, and St. Sebastian wasn’t sure he was proud of those aches. Nor how he’d memorialized them in playlist form.

  Not that Auden Guest probably even recognized any of the songs. With those glasses and that fucking tie, he looked like a boy who listened to classical music on purpose. Like a boy who could tell if a performance of Dvořák was inspired or lifeless, like a boy who had a favorite jacket to wear to the symphony.

  This made St. Sebastian feel very surly. He frowned up at Auden, who had summer sunlight cutting angles across his firm jawline and turning the column of his throat into a shaded chiaroscuro that was very upsetting to look at.

  Auden was just upsetting to look at in general.

  This made St. Sebastian even surlier.

  “Aren’t your parents waiting for you?” St. Sebastian asked, his meaning clear. You’re not welcome.

  Which hopefully hid the real meaning, which coiled and coiled in St. Sebastian’s mind and belly like restless snakes.

  I’m scared of how welcome you are.

  Auden was unfazed by St. Sebastian’s hostility. It was something St. Sebastian remembered from that summer, how cool and haughty Auden could be, how aloof and bored, while St. Sebastian flared with every emotion under the sun. It was beyond infuriating, because all things seething and saturnine eventually burned off like fog, but arrogant dispassion could roll across galaxies unaba
ted and arrive at destinations light years later, still potent with condescension.

  So Auden just looked amused by St. Sebastian’s lack of welcome when he said, “They’re holding court in the abbey still. I escaped because I wanted to find you.”

  St. Sebastian, who usually had a response to everything, had no response.

  Auden didn’t seem bothered by this. “You have something in your hair,” he said, and before St. Sebastian had the chance to react, Auden was doing the unthinkable and kneeling down in such a way that he straddled St. Sebastian’s legs, getting grass stains on the knees of his trousers and also bringing his stomach so close to St. Sebastian’s chest that Auden’s tie rustled against St. Sebastian’s shirt like the wing of a silk bird.

  Auden wrapped long fingers around St. Sebastian’s jaw to hold him still and then carefully extracted a loose blade of grass from St. Sebastian’s hair. It was the closest St. Sebastian had ever been to another person he wasn’t related to in a very long time, and that had to be why his heart was hammering and why it felt like there was a hook buried deep in his chest and Auden was pulling on it . . .

  Auden didn’t move, kneeling over St. Sebastian and keeping his face held tight in his fingers. He glanced at the blade of grass with an odd sort of smile and then tucked the blade of grass into his pocket.